The Unsung Heros
by Jack Cross
Summary: The lost pages, containing the accounts of the defenders of one of the largest blue zone that fought both the dead and the living during the dark years.


**As always, please review and let me know what you think. **

_**Council Grove, Republic of Kansas. **_

**[My first impression of the small town known as one of the Defiant Three is that it resembles a tree house city in a jungle. Various rope bridges span the main street, connecting the various buildings to each other. Several tarps and sheets of canvas are set up on the rooftops and from the second story windows. I immediately get the impression that the towns population lives suspended off of the ground. But I'm quickly proven wrong as I take notice of people on the street. The man I'm here to meet is sitting on the concrete ring surrounding a statute that sits in the center of the town. He wears a BDU jacket, faded blue jeans, and black combat boots.] **

**Mr. Tyler Jackson? **

That's right. Please, sit.

**[I sit on the concrete ring next to him.] **

**You know, you're painted as a hero all over the continent. **

So I'm told. The U.S. even sent this monument in their appreciation for what we did during the war. But a lot of outsiders don't get the idea that **[he motions to the statue behind us, which has three men kneeling and aiming rifles while a fourth stands and aims a pistol]** it didn't happen like that.

**Would you care to share what really happened? **

That's why your here isn't it? Alright, what do you want to know?

**How about you start at the beginning. When did you first realize that it was the undead that you were fighting? **

Right after the police shot a man seventeen times and he kept advancing on them. It was just before the Great Panic, when the initial outbreaks in the United States began. I had just gotten home from basic **[Tyler had just completed basic and entered the Kansas National Guard at the time] **when I noticed that something was wrong with the way the town functioned.

**Did you feel a since of security because the town is so far away from major population centers? **

Of course not. If I've ever been anything, I've been a realist. I studied the various outbreaks of disease before the war, and what I learned is that the distance between cities and towns means jack shit. People carrying the decease run to the uninfected zones because they hope to find a cure or don't realize that they're infected. I saw no difference between this outbreak and all others throughout history. So I began making plans with other people in the area.

**What happened when the Great Panic occurred?**

Our plans were put into action is what happened. A large majority of the town's population panicked and began to head north. We started acting like a soldiers, raiding the grocery store, setting up radio contact with the other towns. I had studied the way Zack moved, the way he acted, and how the military was responding, so we set up on the rooftops and second stories.

**Wasn't the National Guard deployed when the Great Panic set in to try and stop the spread of the infection? **

It depends on which state your talking about. Almost all of Kansas's Guard Units simply fell apart when the Great Panic started. They banded together and started their own communities. Hell that's what happened here, all of us received military training in one form or another.

**Was there a form of partying that took place when the town was abandoned?**

A bunch of us underaged people had a drink or two, and a bunch of us adopted smoking. But beyond that nothing happened. We knew that we had to keep a clear head when Zack first showed up.

**So what happened when the dead first arrived? **

We set up defensive measures along the western bank of the river and tore down the bridges. The Neosho was running high from several rainstorms that had passed through. At first it was amusing to watch the dumb idiots as they fell into the flood waters and get swept away. But things began to get worse when the water began to recede. The current slowed to the point that they could cross, so we retreated up the bank and began to target them.

The river ran red and black with all of the bodies that fell in it. Eventually they reached the western bank despite our best efforts, so I ordered the retreat. Luckily we fell back when we did, cause it turns out that Zack was coming in from behind us at that point.**[He shows a sad smile] **Thirteen of our number were lost retreating to the rooftops.

**Did you have any contact with the outside world after that? **

Depends on what you mean when you say the outside world. We maintained radio contact with strongholds in Herington and Wilsey* for a while. As for Zack's advancement, the only way we could tell was when 100.3, 97.5, and 99.9* went down one by one. We knew that we were well behind the lines then.

**How thick was the undead presence on the street? **

It varied a lot. Some days there were hardly any, other days it looked like a river of bodies below us. We remained as quite as we could, acting like we didn't exist. In the early days we rarely engaged them, laying low and conserving ammunition was our major priority

**Where there any times when someone amongst the group became infected? **

Unfortunately yes. I'm sure that every other blue zone in the country had to deal with problems like that. How we dealt with them depended on the amount of the enemy on the street. If there was a few, we shot the person in the head, if there were several, we snapped their neck.

**And if the streets were packed? **

We did the most human thing we could. It wasn't fun waiting on the person to slip into the coma stage and then throwing them to Zack, that was my least favorite thing to do. But all in all it had to be done.

**At what point did you decide to go on the offensive? **

It was about a year after the Great Panic that we finally began to attack them. We had lost contact with Herington, and the folks in Wilsey were running low on supplies. If they went dark, not only would we be totally alone but we would also loose the availability of a major source of food.

So we raided a gas station and a liquor store and waited until the intersection at the center of our little community **[He motions to the intersection we are currently sitting in]** was jammed full. It was then that we unleashed hell. Every person on these rooftops were throwing a Molotov or emptying a bucket of gas.

Dear God did the air stink after that. It got so bad that we had to pull out the gas masks we had packed up when this whole thing started.

Luckily for us, that was just step one. Step two we began to clear out the streets surrounding us, recovering vehicles that had been abandoned when the town was overrun. With all that, plus the canned food we had recovered, the first supply convoy was sent on its way.

**What encouraged you to spread out and retake other communities? **

When we discovered that we weren't totally alone like we thought. It started with Cottonwood Falls one day, then another town and another and another. Literately within the span of a month, a grand total of eleven counties* had made contact. Over the radio, we shared information ranging from the locations of various hordes, to what the current playmate of the month looked like. From what we could make out, major towns like Junction City, Emporia, El Dorado, and Wichita* were swarming with Zack, so we thought it best to steer clear of those places.

**Footnotes: **

*Herington and Wilsey are remembered along with Council Grove as the Defiant Three during the dark times. Out of the three, only Herington was completely overrun.

* Pre War FM stations broadcast out of Topeka, Junction City, and Salina. Out of the three, only 100.3 broadcast emergency messages.

*Eleven counties, stretching from I70 near Junction City and Fort Riley to the Oklahoma state line at Coffeyville that would eventually form the Republic of Kansas, and be the only blue zone to remain independent from the United States.

*Wichita was the most populated city in Kansas before the war. During the campaign to take back the lower 48, it proved to be one of the more troublesome cities to reclaim.


End file.
